Like every year, The Animation Society of India (TASI) hosted the 14th Anifest India at Jai Hind College in Mumbai. Currently in its 18th year, TASI has been in the forefront for encouraging and recognising animation talents across the country along with providing various opportunities for them.
TASI opened gates of its annual event, Anifest. As the event is rightly called for the animators, by the animators, the 14th Anifest did saw the honchos from the animation industry and many aspiring animators gather at the auditorium of Jai Hind College, Mumbai.
With an intriguing fun travel video by Anand Baid, the crowd was left hooked to their seats for gthe entire day. The event opened with welcome address from the organisers that included Vaibhav Kumaresh and Vaibhav More – noted names in the animation industry. The first session found Aum Animation Studios founder Vivek Bolar talking about the future of animation with the help of the Open Source software. He gave a detailed presentation on Blender and informed with examples the immense possibilities of the software that’s is now offering cutting edge technology to artists for free.
He further emphasised on its benefits with an intention to create an awareness about the brighter future of the software which isn’t amateur anymore. Bolar also presented ‘Freshness’ (2013), a project that they created with the BETA version of the software for their client, which turned out to be better than their expectation.
He also showed some clips of the creation of their IP – ‘Andy Pirki’, which they have entirely created on Open Source software. They’re now currently working on 78 episodes of seven minutes of the successful animated series. He further mentioned that the approach for creating IPs and doing an outsourced work is entirely different. He said, “The approach while creating an IP and doing it as a service job is very different. If ‘Andy Pirki’ wasn’t our IP, we would have taken an approach and I don’t think we could have made it this way.”
With the minds ignited already, the audience were eager to know more about the industry and how an idea reaches the screen. The doubt was cleared with a fun session by Native Puppets Animation Studio and Academy founder Anand Baid, who showed how to pitch an animated concept by providing a behind the scenes look at how to successfully pitch one’s creative idea. A former DreamWorks India animator, Baid has over 18 years of experience in the field of animation. He segregated the pitches in few points namely Basic Idea, Visual Bible, Animatic, Teaser and Episodic.
Baid showed some humorous and well made clips along with live sound effects and dialogues by himself, from his IP – ‘Raja Mantri ke Royal Adventures’ and made them come alive on the screen. Targeted possibly at five to nine years 06 23 old, ‘Raja Mantri ke Royal Adventures’ follows a king and his ‘mantri’ getting transported to different places and time zones by playing the game of ‘Rock Paper Scissors’. The worlds the duo explored includes the Dino world, the Retro world, the Western world and the tribal world to name a few. He also mentioned how the creators should try to be flexible with their ideas or concepts and be open to make a change if the need arises, to make the animated series popular amongst broadcasters.
Both Bolar and Baid’s sessions were followed by extensive Q&A session where the audience that consisted of students, industry professionals and upcoming artists got their doubts cleared and questions answered.
The crowd left to grab a quick bite during the lunch break, as the hunger for knowledge was not going to end so soon.The next session attracted much more fans as independent artist and professor at Symbiosis, Vishal Wadaye presented the nitty gritties of character design and caricature with live demonstration of a completely new character sketch and caricature of artist Chetan Sharma.
An engineer by profession and trained in painting, Wadaye showed simultaneous expressive and funny rapid line drawing with plan layout followed by the construction of structural drawings. He showed the audience how the perspective in drawing needs to be considered to make any illustration stand out. Wadaye said, “No drawing is good or bad. It’s either mature or immature.” The crowd not only enjoyed the live demo of a cute illustration of Ganpati (the elephant head God), but also got the opportunity to tune in to melodious songs by Wadaye.
Bolar’s previous session was just not enough to give an idea about the Open Source community and hence another session talking about a feature from Blender, Grease Pencil followed. The Grease Pencil feature inside Blender, enables an artist to create fluid hand drawn animation. It was a look back to the period of nostalgia through the real charm of 2D animation using the latest digital technology.
First developed by Daniel Martinez and Lara, Grease Pencil is used to create the layout, planning the environment of the story/content, animation and ability to see the animation in that situation. Bolar showed a 30 seconds clip of a layout design using the Grease Pencil from scratch to the final output. He also showed how the 3D frame is put and the distance is maintained from its background.
The audience were enjoying the seminars when Vaibhav Kumaresh announced about the interesting next session – TASI Viewer’s Choice Awards. The fest saw the screenings and live voting of 18 chosen short animated films created by students across the globe. The list goes as follows – Aesthesis, Baba, Expend, Kim, Maa Tuki (Find me Mother), Mehua, Memo, My Body, Night Witches, Outremer, Parfum Fraise, Quand j’ai remplacé Camille, Sans Gravité, Sonder, Stress, Stuffed, The Stained Club and Touch.
All these films were unique and had an underlying message. With least dialogues, most of the films emoted its thought and intention aptly making it really difficult to decide whom to vote, but we have done our part. With young animators creating such beautiful films and events like Anifest are bringing them out in limelight, we can truly say that the future of animation lies in great hands. A session showing a step-by-step overview of creating animated cinematic content followed, using Unity’s toolset and that was a wrap for the first day of the two-day event!
Watch the space to know how tomorrow’s session is going to be all fun again!